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Monthly Archives: February 2009

I think it’s about time I told you about the various alternative medical and other therapies I have used in my 57 years on the planet to successfully treat a variety of serious illnesses.

In my life I have experienced the highest highs of physical health and connection to my spiritual source, and the lowest lows. I have been in the most fantastic mental, emotional and physical condition, and have experienced debilitating physical illness and suicidal depression.

If you are reading this and you are sick, I’ve been there. If you arein the greatest shape and have not a care in the world, I’ve been there as well. In this multi-part blog I am going to describe what I’ve been through and how I have successfully treated a wide variety of physical and mental ailments with what are called “alternative” medical treatments.

First, a little bit about my family history. My grandfather Harold, on my father’s side, died of a heart attack at the age of 33. My grandfather on my mom’s side, Frank Martin, died of a heart attack at the age of 51. My mother, Lorraine Martin, died of leukemia in her mid-20’s, when I was 3. So my family has a history of heart disease and cancer.

My first experience with illness (other than the usual childhood illnesses) came when I was about 7. I started feeling really weird, like I was going a little bonkers. These periods only lasted for a couple of hours at a time, and the rest of the time I felt “normal,” whatever that is, but my parents got worried and sent me to a child psychologist. This fellow did some tests and decided that I was just “going through a phase.” It wasn’t until almost 5 decades later, after I had experienced a severe increase in these symptoms over time, that I discovered the reason for this.

When I was in college, back in 1969, it was the height of the drug era, and I did my share. Unfortunately, one day I was smoking some pretty powerful dope (laced with something I don’t even remember) and I went over the edge. I felt like my entire body and my psyche was being turned inside out (especially inside my brain) accompanied by a horrible feeling of depression. Whatever happened to me at 7, was magnified big-time at the age of 18. I felt like this off and on for almost a year before it finally went away. This was the first of 6 cycles of depression that I experienced, at approximately 9-year intervals, until I reached the age of 54, when I suffered a debilitating physical and mental crash. I’ll get to the bottom of this mystery in a moment.

Now don’t think for a moment that I have lived a debilitating life! I have had periods of debilitation, that is true, but in between I have also felt really wonderful. For 25 years I was a runner, and even though I had periods of depression I was in really great physical condition. Those reading this might think I am “bipolar,” but that is not the case. There is a specific physical reason for the phenomena I am describing, that I am now handling permanently with some exciting new alternative technology that I'll describe in a later blog post.

My father taught me that weakness of any kind was insupportable, and so I never told anyone about my bouts of depression, I just sucked it up. I was “mentally tough,” and never got any help, and even when I did get counseling help later on, it didn’t make any difference. That’s because my depressive cycles had a purely physical cause: mercury poisoning from my dental amalgam fillings. Mercury and lead are insidious poisons that cause a variety of serious mental and physical symptoms, among them depression and chronic fatigue.

Since the age of 7 I had a sweet tooth, and I was a tooth grinder. For decades, I kept crunching mercury from my fillings into my system, and then replacing my old dental amalgam with new amalgam. Fortunately, according to PhD chemist Andrew Hall Cutler, only 1% to 5% of the population is affected by this problem. I am writing a book about my experiences in a book called “To Hell and Back: My Experience with Mercury Poisoning from Dental Amalgam,” so I won’t go much further into this, other than to say that on Jan 1, 2005, I finally crashed and burned. I could barely walk and I was in a constant state of depression. I saw my medical doctor and he wanted to put me on meds, but I lied and told him it wasn’t that bad. Then I searched for alternative remedies.

Let’s go back in time from 2005 to 1980. While playing Frisbee at my mother-in-law’s house on July 4th of that year, I experienced chest pains and difficulty breathing. I knew that my grandfather had died early from heart attacks, and I was scared to death.

Fortunately for me, I saw a naturopathic doctor, Eugene Watkins N.D., who is a famous herbologist and who practices iridology. Iridology is a branch of alternative medicine that believes that patterns, colors, and other characteristics of the iris can be examined to determine information about a patient's systemic health.

Now there are proponents and detractors of all alternative health disciplines, especially from the orthodox medical community, but all I can say is that it worked for me! [1]. Dr. Watkins gave me a herbal formula called “Heart Tonic,” a liquid formulation composed of hawthorn berries, motherwort, and myrrh. Apparently, this formula has been around for centuries in herbology. Dr. Watkins told me that my heart was weak but that it could be repaired. He explained (in layman’s terms) that the cells of the body replicated themselves periodically, and that the herbal formula would operate to “get rid of the bad heart cells and strengthen new ones.” He told me that in herbology, the healing curve often goes down before it goes back, and to expect heart-attack like symptoms, but not to worry.

Well, the very next day I was 25 feet up on a ladder, painting a house, when all of a sudden my chest felt like it was caving in. I grabbed onto the ladder in a panic and inched my way down. I told my partner that I was having “a problem” and that I needed to rest for a while. So I sat with my back against the side of the house and sweated, wondering whether I too would die young. After a minute or two, however, the symptoms went away. Fortunately I remembered what Dr. Watkins had told me, and so I didn’t rush off to the hospital.

I went home early that day. After three months on “Heart Tonic,” (which I still take to this day) I was back on my feet and feeling much better. I know where to look in the eye for the heart area (you can get iridology charts that tell you where to look for specific tissue weaknesses) and what was very dark is now white, indicating healing. Anyone who claims that “the iris does not undergo change in an individuals life” simply does not know what they are talking about. [2] That was my third experience with alternative medicine.

About a year earlier I had had a strange, debilitating experience. I developed a swelling on my left side, and a great deal of pain that left me on crutches. I could find no physical explanation for why this happened, it just did. I saw a doctor and he had no clue. He wanted to do exploratory surgery, but I decided to try a therapy now known as Traumatic Incident Reduction. Back then it was called Dianetics, based on a book called “Dianetics” by L. Ron Hubbard. This guy turned out to be a nutcase, but before he went nutty he did some pretty good work (some might say he stole that work, but I don’t have time to get into that!)

Essentially, TIR works by returning your awareness to a painful or traumatic incident and simply going through it over and over, and over again, with a very simple protocol. Fantastic results have been achieved with this simple method, which is based upon the idea that the mind, when properly focused and directed, can affect the body.

For those of us on a spiritual path, the idea that
spirit, mind, and body are connected is a no-brainer. Medical doctors and scientists might pooh-pooh this, but every culture upon the face of the earth, throughout history, has recognized this fundamental truth, the truth that a human being is a spiritual entity having a temporary physical experience. Well anyway, to make a long story short, after several of these sessions, my body gradually returned to normal. The swelling and the pain went away, and I felt good again. I still have the crutches in my basement, as a souvenir of my first experience with alternative medical treatment.

Unscientific? Maybe, but you cannot argue with results!

Actually, that was my second experience with alternative medical success.

My first was back in 1977, when I learned about something called a “touch assist.” One day I went for a run in my local park, and I tripped hard over a little wooden bench. My ankle swelled up and soon became dark purple, and I could barely walk. I decided, “what the heck, I’ll try out this touch assist thing and see if it works.” What you do is get yourself in the exact same position as when you hurt yourself, and go over exactly what happened in your mind, over and over. So I stood up awkwardly and placed my body and my foot where I had injured it, as best as I was able on my swollen ankle. I closed my eyes and stood there, going over and over the incident. After about a minute I felt a big increase in pain, then a decrease, and then nothing. After 5 minutes I said, “OK, that didn’t work. Let’s go home.” But when I put my foot down on the ground it felt better. And when I looked at my ankle, the blue and purple ugliness had almost totally gone! Was it the mind influencing the body?

Is this unscientific? Maybe, but you cannot argue with results.

I am by nature a skeptical person, but in the space of 3 years I had had two experiences that showed me the power of the mind, properly directed, to heal the body. These experiences were invaluable in helping me maintain the mental confidence and belief in myself when far more serious illnesses occurred later on.(To be continued)

[1] I am not arguing that alternative medicine doesn’t have its share of quacks. But beware of quacks from the medical community, who dismiss all alternative medicine and its practitioners, especially the fraud known as Stephen Barrett, who claims to be a medical doctor but whose license was taken away in 1993. Barrett runs an outfit called “Quackwatch,” which is itself a discredited organization. Barrett was forced to admit in a Canadian court that what he does is to destroy natural treatments and those who practice them, and a California judge pronounced that he was “incompetent” to do the work he claims to do. See “Failed MD Stephen Barrett” at http://www.quackpotwatch.org/quackpots/quackpots/barrett.htm

[2] From Wikipedia (take EVERYTHING you read on Wikiopedia with a grain of salt, as my grandma used to say): “It has been pointed out that the premise of iridology is at odds with the notion that the iris does not undergo changes in an individual's life. Iris texture is a phenotypical feature which develops during gestation and remains unchanged after birth. There is no evidence for changes in the iris pattern other than variations in pigmentation in the first year of life, eventual freckles and variations caused by glaucoma treatment. This stability of iris structures is at the foundation of iris recognition for identification purposes.” This is nonsense, of course, as I have seen my heart lines gradually turn from black to white over a period of 20 years on “Heart Tonic.”